Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

It's a great idea but not fully baked yet. My former colleague is using it for internal apps and it seems to work fairly well (UI is not fancy), but not for anything going into the high volume apps, which has much more complex behavior (designers are asking for stupidly complex UI). It's much better in the upcoming OS since they added better navigation, but requires the latest OS, which is not supportive for many companies who try to support back at least 1 year.

Will it ever be mainstream for iOS/MacOS? Maybe, if Apple would use it way more than they have so far, thus improvement by dogfooding. It is nice to build apps this way, but there are way too many bizarre gotchas still for most people unless you can live with more flexible designs.

View on HN

At my company we've been slowly rewriting our UIKit app in SwiftUI. We were due for a rewrite when SwiftUI dropped. I'd say we're about 75% done.

For those "stupidly complex UIs", SwiftUI just doesn't have enough hooks for customization. And the improvements are too slow. Using SwiftUI has been bitter-sweet. It feels like you just can't use it to craft a high quality app that doesn't look like a generic iOS app.

Is looking like a generic iOS app that bad?! Especially here on HN where the sentiment is pro plain html etc. a generic iOS UI should be well received

I’m new to HN. Why the inclination towards plainness? Is it because of performance or look or something else?

I think a lot of hackers in general, not just on Hacker News, feel like a lot of UI concerns are just bikeshedding.

What do you think might be good counter examples of this not being the case?

Maybe Instagram, Discord... I was going to say Robinhood, but the free trading might have been the real differentiator?

I think both Instagram and Discord is quite bad on the UX-front on iOS. Strangely enough Microsoft’s Outlook is quite decent while it still looks a bit distinct. It is not generally true of google’s iOS apps that I assume started using Flutter and it feels from time to time (mostly not-smooth scrolling)

I think Instagram is actually quite fabulous considering how navigating stories has become muscle memory for hundreds of millions of people. And even after they have been around for some time it is still satisfying to tap that profile pic with the ring around it.

We are also in the middle of a rewrite to SwiftUI, did you include the multiplatform option in Xcode 14? Or is automatic. We are just like 5% progress.

> It feels like you just can't use it to craft a high quality app that doesn't look like a generic iOS app.

To be honest, as a user, I'd really rather see more "generic iOS apps". I think too many design teams are self-centered and do not consider that users need the apps not to admire their wonderful creations, but to get certain things done. In other words, your app is the center of your world, but it is not the center of mine. It's something I want to use to get stuff done quickly, with minimum effort, and with minimum cognitive load. Generic is good.

I agree with you. I’m currently in the process of developing a app aimed partially at an educator / student crowd, and partially at a general audience of people who are obsessed with words & dictionaries. My app is almost the poster child of generic iOS interfaces.

It’s not released yet, but my beta testers seem to love it. Most of them are non-technical. I haven’t written the on boarding stuff yet but the generic UI/UX means they get up to speed quickly even without a tutorial. I’ve received considerable praise for how intuitive it is.

It’s developed in SwiftUI. My first time working on iOS. My experience is similar to others. 75% of the time, it’s a joy to use. 25% is spent pulling my hair out over internal bugs and bad documentation.

SwiftUI is an interesting toolkit. It is really good at making "generic iOS UI". But it's also very good at making something completely custom. I actually think this might be a good thing, because the UIs that people hate are the ones that pretend to be standard but are drawn by hand in ways that are not standard at all.

> designers are asking for stupidly complex UI

I think a mobile app should have a stupidly simple UI instead. Designers traditionally use a graphics program to design pixels. SwiftUI let’s you design layouts and components. Maybe designers should change how they design and start using SwiftUI as a design tool.

Your comment reminds me how asinine some Designs orgs have become at companies. Basically chasing fashion statements and demanding Engineers “just do it” with little consideration to the development, maintenance, and testing costs.

Modern development, at some companies, can truly feel regressive at times.

It’s like Design for Machining, if you’re fabricating metal parts.

Become? Frontend web development was always like that.

There’s a back port of the nav view at https://github.com/johnpatrickmorgan/NavigationBackport

Obviously, this should be something Apple invests into itself. But they're not going to do it because their culture does not value it; actually, they're often culturally blind to the fact that it might even be useful to provide this. With SwiftUI this kind of nearsightedness really hurts the platform.

i think they have a very strong momentum to pushing os releases since... forever...

decoupling is hard to do and i was shocked (and gratified) they backported async/await... but swiftui is ui-level, im guessing there must be some real pushback for backporting it...

as a customer/developer, the whole os release every year is getting kind of old tbh...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com